Hanson Engines

Illustration cited from.: https://profitfromfolly.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/why-im-an-optimist/

To zoom out is useful. It puts the events networks of our spacetime in perspective without to loose grip on details. Including on what the great Jorje Luis Borges was calling the Orbis Tertius :

''ORBIS TERTIUS. "Tertius" (Latin = third) is an allusion to: World 3: the world of the products of the human mind, defined by Karl Popper.''

Poetically stated, ''retrodiction studies'' - like this, this and this - enables us to get a glimpse on the "clear, cold lines of eternity". Back in 20th century Prof Robin Hanson put together this extremely insightful and strong document.

Long-Term Growth As A Sequence of Exponential Modes,

First Version 9/11/98, Revised 5/03/00, Substantially renewed 12/00

Economy grows. Unstoppably. Hanson's unprecedented contribution was to provide us with systematic orientation tool on how and why economy grows.

It accelerates. See:

Mode      Doubling   Date Began   Doubles Doubles Transition

Grows     Time (DT) To Dominate of DT    of WP    CES Power

----------   ---------     -----------       ------    -------    ----------

Brain size   34M yrs     550M B.C.      ?          "16"          ?

Hunters     224K yrs    2000K B.C.    7.3         8.9           ?

Farmers      909 yrs     4856 B.C.       7.9       7.6          2.4

Industry     6.3 yrs         2020 A.D.     7.2      >9.2       0.094

The model identifies the past economy accelerators as.:

- neural networks, evolving into doubling brain size each 30-ish megayears (hinting that human level of intelligence is an inevitability: +/-30 millions of years around the Now, by the virtue of the good old 'coin-toss' Darwinian algorithm alone.)

- human as the top-of-the-foodchains predator since around 2 000 000 BC. (maybe the human mastering of the Fire and the Blade to blame), compressing the doubling time with over two orders of magnitude down to a quarter of a million of years.

- Food production, ecosystem manipulation, biospheric modification (or rather the collimation of farming, horse domestication and writing as accelerator components), leading to less than 40 human generations per economy doubling.

- All we know as division of labor, specialization, systematized Sci-Tech... industry - the centralized ways for production and control of knowledge leading to another hundreds-fold compression down to mere ~decade of economy doubling time.

Recommended: digest each Hanson (economy accelerator drive or) Engine with the Bob Hettinga's 'ensime':

My observation about networks in general is a rather obvious one when you think about it: our social structures map to our communication structures. As intuitive as it is to understand, this observation provides great insight into where the technology of computer assisted communication will take us in the years ahead.

Connectivity specs as indicator and drive. Mankind as kinda-sorta ''second order'' connectome.

Connectivity as social network topology for the human nodes stay constants, more or less the same across space - human species diversity is negligible all over the world & time - the indvidual humans mostly unchanged for dozens of thousands of generations...

So far, we are quite much social atoms over hundreds of millions of square miles and hundreds of thousands of years.

What changes is the organization.

Now, when we leave the past and use these models to gaze into the future, the really interesting stuff comes out.

Aside from giving explanation to the, detected by Brad DeLong in his also monumental paper, overall trajectory of the economy, the nucleus of meaning in the Rob Hanson's paper is:

Typically, the economy is dominated by one particular mode of economic growth, which produces a constant growth rate. While there are often economic processes which grow exponentially at a rate much faster than that of the economy as a whole, such processes almost always slow down as they become limited by the size of the total economy. Very rarely, however, a faster process reforms the economy so fundamentally that overall economic growth rates accelerate to track this new process. The economy might then be thought of as composed of an old sector and a new sector, a new sector which continues to grow at its same speed even when it comes to dominate the economy.

Visualize: a Petri dish and sugar being expanded in size and quantity by the accelerating growth of the bacterial culture in it. Predator-prey model looped into positive feedback !!

Hanson actually predicted nearly quarter of century ago, ... something that is relentlessly coming.

In the CES model (which this author prefers) if the next number of doubles of DT were the same as one of the last three DT doubles, the next doubling time would be ... 1.3, 2.1, or 2.3 weeks. This suggests a remarkably precise estimate of an amazingly fast growth rate. ... it seems hard to escape the conclusion that the world economy will likely see a very dramatic change within the next century, to a new economic growth mode with a doubling time perhaps as short as two weeks.

An economy accelerator avalanche is roaring down the slope of time towards us.

A brand new Hanson Engine is about to leave the assembly line. Soon.

The slope of time gets steeper and steeper and it is increasingly hard to look ahead.

Singularity is like if a bat or dolphin or other relying on echolocation creature approaches and exceeds the speed of sound.

We still can guess by detecting patterns emerging onto the shockwave front.

Nothing in the Human Condition formula is necessarily fixed, of course. Humans, spaces and timespans are all variable.

Singularity is also smooth in man-years:

"The singularities are happening fairly regularly but at an increasing rate, every 500 to 1000 billion man-years (the total sum of the worldwide population over time). The baby boom of the 1950 is about 200 Billion man-years ago."-- author unknown, harvested from the Net about a decade ago.

The growth rate gets accelerated on every ... between a half and one trillion person-years.

With other words.: what's achieved so far by all the mankind - about 100 billion human lives over the last about million years - would take several trillion years to a single human being or one year to a trillions strong population.